Driving north from downtown Hanover got a lot more interesting this summer, which is a testament to the power and the significance of architecture. In a culture that is too often oblivious to the quality of its buildings, the community is abuzz with talk of what one motorist, Joan Ashley of Norwich, calls “that funny green” – the warm, almost olive color of the metal siding that covers much of the new Richmond Middle School.
“Not only I, but many other Route 10 observers, thought and hoped that the green was primer, and whatever the final surface color, it would look visually integrated with the brick,” agrees Anne Baird of Lyme. “Not so. I wish were driving by with a delighted "ah!," rather than an "oh no, why is it so ugly?"
Green does indeed loom large here, but not necessarily in the sense meant by the car-bound critics. After all, how much more of that dark and stolid Dartmouth green can one community withstand? And the motorists can’t see the back of the school, where a classroom wing reaches into a forest whose greenery, much of it coniferous and thus not seasonal, actually resonates pleasingly with the siding.
A green worthy of more serious discussion concerns the laudable decision of the Dresden School District and its designers, Banwell Architects of Lebanon, to make energy efficiency such a high priority. Beneath the siding is a layer of foam insulation. Air ventilated to the gym, cafeteria and auditorium, is controlled by carbon dioxide sensors – the more people are breathing there, the more the air is blowing. It is expected that 85 percent of the heat will come from burning wood – a renewable, locally produced fuel.
Banwell’s attention to lighting is especially noteworthy. In a typical classroom, according to the firm’s Stuart White, “sunlight striking clerestory south glass is intercepted by a reflective shelf that reflects daylight to the ceiling, and this light is diffused and reflected back to the classroom. The shelf eliminates glare, and usable solar light minimizes the need for electric lights.” By way of translation, “clerestory glass” refers to the windows that are close to the ceiling rather than at a level conducive to student daydreaming.
Sun shades adorn the south-facing windows. The days of green design meaning big walls of windows facing south are over, at least for schools. “We are often asked to make sure that classrooms have a lot of south facing glass to take advantage of passive solar heating, White reports. “ The problem is that too much south glass will result in overheated classrooms, even on frigid but sunny days in January, and excessive heat loss at night.”
The kind of green that is troubling, with respect to the Richmond Middle School, is the green printed by Uncle Sam. Energy efficient attributes notwithstanding, you can tell even before one student has set foot in the place that, relatively speaking, the place was built on the cheap.
At some point, when the subject is the public realm, architecture criticism must become indistinguishable from politics. That point is now, in a region that refuses to tax itself adequately so as to perpetuate the historic commitment to public education as a democratizing and upward mobility-inducing force.
Instructed to economize and then economize some more, the architects did the right thing and, alas, had to give the building’s appearance short shrift. “For example,” according to English teacher Jody Horan, “from the outside, at the north end, the auditorium is a box, right? Inside, we have a fabulous stage and auditorium and music rooms plus practice spaces. At the old school, our tiny stage was at one end of the library . . . Our old library had no windows at all . . . and now it has an entire wall of windows looking out on the back woods and skylights that further brighten the area for learning and reading.”
But the message delivered to the street still counts, and it’s as obvious as the Ledyard Bridge balls: The two richest towns in the region are unwilling to invest in their future. Particularly if you live in a less wealthy community, that’s worthy of a shudder.
As evidence, consider a school whose entrance is spiffed up with various decorative gestures that are obviously superficial – a corner that is extended upward a few feet to form a peak, a couple of offices that protrude as a semi-circular module, a band of windows to frame the main doors on three sides, a doorway crowed with a glass triangle. Then zoom out: The expensive brick, everywhere scaled back in favor of siding reminiscent of Danny DeVito and Richard Dreyfuss in The Tin Men, eventually gives way altogether to the kind of cinderblock one associates with correctional institutions.
In other places, new public schools express higher aspirations. Thom Mayne – whose 2005 Pritzker Prize makes him the architectural equivalent of a Nobel laureate – is famous in part for his Diamond Ranch High School in Los Angeles (pictured above), a series of bold angles and cantilevers, clad in corrugated metal. They are the building itself, as opposed to its decoration, and they inspire students to notice and to think about their surroundings.
In other times, new public buildings in New Hampshire also had higher aspirations. Even the State Hospital campus in Concord, built in the early 20th Century, is a sturdy and graceful disquisition in brick and granite on the subject of permanence. Remarkably, we did this even for a complex whose purpose was to warehouse people because of their then-untreatable mental illnesses.
Some day, historians may hail the creators of the new Richmond Middle School for their vision and insight. They foresaw the coming energy crisis. They knew people would come to love a new shade of green (and thus used siding that never needs repainting). And they also created something that could easily be torn down, or converted to an annex of the printing company next door, which it resembles. These will be useful options should public education finally succumb altogether.
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The author, an attorney and architecture writer, was educated in public schools.
